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Wikipedia: Origin and growth

In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, California, to

establish Bomis, Inc., a Web portal company. In March 2000 Wales founded Nupedia,
a free online encyclopaedia, with Larry Sanger as editor in chief. Nupedia was
organized like existing encyclopaedias, with an advisory…

Internet

Internet, a system architecture that has revolutionized communications and methods

of commerce by allowing various computer networks around the world to
interconnect. Sometimes referred to as a “network of networks,” the Internet
emerged in the United States in the 1970s but did not become visible to the general
public until…


 encyclopaedia

Encyclopaedia, reference work that contains information on all branches of

knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive
manner. For more than 2,000 years encyclopaedias have existed as summaries of
extant scholarship in forms comprehensible to their readers. The
word encyclopaedia is derived from…

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Jimmy Wales
QUICK FACTS
BORN

August 8, 1966 (age 54)

Huntsville, Alabama

FOUNDER OF

 “Wikipedia”
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 “The Cathedral & the Bazaar”

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Open source
social movement

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WRITTEN BY

Eric S. Raymond
Computer programmer. Editor of The New Hacker's Dictionary, and author of The
Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental
Revolutionary.

See Article History

Open source, social movement, begun by computer programmers, that

rejects secrecy and centralized control of creative work in favour of
decentralization, transparency, and unrestricted (“open”) sharing of
information. Source refers to the human-readable source code of computer
programs, as opposed to the compiled computer programming
language instructions, or object code, that run on computers but cannot be
easily understood or modified by people.
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